Ubuntu 12.04 under Hyper-V on Windows 8

Recently a number of the Hyper-V drivers for Linux made it into the main kernel branch.  This means that native support for Hyper-V is starting to turn up in a number of Linux distributions.  Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is an example of a new Linux release with Hyper-V support “out of the box”.  To try this out for myself – I grabbed the 32-bit desktop install media from Ubuntu.com and fired up a virtual machine:

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After the initial splash screen, I was pleasantly surprised by the first indication of the improved Hyper-V support.  Before even install Ubuntu, on the first page of setup, I already had integrated mouse support.

Ubuntu-12-2

I chose to Install Ubuntu and was then presented with a page that confirmed that I had enough space, and I had a valid internet connection. This was also interesting to note, as I had not added a legacy network adapter to the virtual machine.  This meant that Ubuntu had already recognized and loaded drivers for the Hyper-V high-performance network adapter.

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After this – the installation was fairly pedestrian…

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The only quirk I encountered was that at the end of the initial installation phase – the virtual machine failed to reboot automatically.  It sat at this page for about a minute until I manually reset it:

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But after that it booted perfectly:

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And I confirmed that applications and network connectivity was working correctly:

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My favorite part of this was seeing this message:

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“No proprietary drivers are in use on this system”.  Correct! The Hyper-V drivers are now part of Linux, under GPL.

Cheers,
Ben